In the modern information society, broadcasting plays an immeasurably important role. Most of all, television broadcasting that directly offers viewers video information together with acoustic information has had a large impact. The broadcast technology covers a wide range of technology areas including signal processing, signal transmission and reception, and acoustic and video information processing. Moreover, transmission is carried out in various forms, including broadcast mode using radio waves such as ground waves and satellite waves and cable television mode, or one utilizing computer communications.
The ownership rate for television is considerably high, and almost every household has it. Broadcasts coming from broadcast stations are viewed and listened by an indefinite large number of people. Moreover, another manner of viewing broadcasts is recording received broadcasts whereby once they are recorded they can be viewed whenever desired.
For reproduction of the broadcast contents, conventionally used are VCRs and HDD recorders. On the other hand, there is a demand for reproducing recorded content on portable devices such as PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants), that is, at any suitable place at any preferred time for having fun. The problem here is that, however, the indication display provided in the portable devices of such a type has the different aspect ratio from that of a television receiver.
A viewer for reproducing the recorded contents on the portable devices does not generally have the mechanism for aspect ratio conversion. Thus, the image signal must be transferred to a device for adjustment of the aspect ratio before display on the portable device.
On the other hand, the VCRs and HDD recorders are basically so structured as to record incoming image signals with their the original aspect ratio. Moreover, reproducing video tapes on the portable devices is physically impossible, and with the HDD recorders, recording media themselves are nonremovable and thus cannot be carried around wherever desired. In view of this, to make possible viewing on the portable device, an external memory is considered suitable due to its smaller-size and lighter-weight for ease of carrying around.
What is more, with a conventional recorder, recording is carried out without information about video ID signals that has been superimposed on video signals at the time of recording. As a result, even if the mechanism of aspect ratio conversion is provided to the device for the display, no automatic conversion is available.
As an example, an information recording and reproducing system has been proposed which adjusts images to aspect ratio information (for example, refer to Patent Document 1). A proposal has been made to adjust according to the aspect ratio information when reproducing video signals read from recording media such as DVDs, but not to carry out the aspect ratio information adjustment when recording video signals in such recording media. In other words, if the video signals written onto the recording are not already compatible with the viewer of the portable device, they cannot be reproduced on the portable devices.
[Patent Document 1]
JP-A-2002-251830